Entrust Provides Southampton City Council With Secure Web Portal Solution For UK 'SmartPath' Project

Enabling 6,000 of Southampton's Citizens to make secure transactions with the council to apply for housing and monitor the progress of housing repair requests online

09 Apr 2002

DALLAS,TX. - Entrust, Inc., [NASDAQ: ENTU] the leading provider of enhanced Internet security products and solutions announced a Q1/2002 contract win to provide Southampton City Council with a Secure Web Portal solution using Entrust GetAccess? software for the first phase of its 'SmartPath' project in the UK.

This SmartPath project is one of the UK government's twenty-five Pathfinder projects initiated by the Department for Transport Local Government and Regions (DTLR) to deliver improved services online.  Implemented in less than three months, the first phase of the project is due to go live on April 18th when it will be actively deployed for use by Southampton's citizens enabling them to conduct secure transactions with the council through the use of public kiosks as well as home PCs.

The first online program, to be piloted by 6,000 citizens, is a housing repairs application through which citizens will be able to monitor the progress of repair requests online through personalized and secured transactions using Entrust GetAccess?.  Once this phase is completed the aim is to scale-up the infrastructure to include further services and accommodate up to 250,000 users through more access channels across the remainder of the city.

This project builds on the success of the city's SmartCities multi-application smart card initiative originally launched in Spring 2000.  With added functionality, the existing smart cards are used to access the web portal through public kiosks within a pre-defined area of the City, so that citizens can still make use of the service even if they don't have a home computer.

Sean Dawtry, SmartPath Programme Manager for Southampton City Council commented, "Our ultimate aim is to transform the way we work and interact with citizens by putting all of our future services online.  Therefore the IT infrastructure implemented in phase one needs to be robust enough to manage both high availability and increases in scalability.  We chose Entrust because they are able to provide a scaleable technology solution for our requirements now and in the future. Entrust very rapidly grasped the complexity of our requirements, responding quickly and efficiently to our requests.  It has a good understanding of the way E-Government initiatives work, having worked with the top E-Governments worldwide."

Entrust's enhanced Internet security delivers transactions seamlessly through a secure, open, robust and scalable infrastructure.  Southampton City Council is implementing Entrust Authority? and Entrust Entelligence? software through which citizens are issued managed digital certificates (IDs) to enable them to engage in secure transactions with the City Council.  These IDs will be stored on the SmartCities card enabling its holder to be authenticated to a personalized, secure web portal.

When citizens log on to the portal using the SmartCities card, a pin number is requested, opening a secure connection.  Entrust GetAccess? enables a citizen, if authorized, to access the portal hosted on both web and application servers protected behind a firewall.  The certificate server and Entrust GetAccess are integrated, enabling authentication based on the digital certificates.  The same architecture will be used for internal staff access to Southampton City Council systems.

"The Internet is a means of bringing local government closer to the people they serve through delivering services with greater efficiency, " said Colin Wyatt, Vice President and Managing Director of Entrust Europe.  "We are very proud to be providing Southampton City Council with a trusted Internet security infrastructure, giving citizens both the confidence and convenience to conduct secure online transactions with the council.  Furthermore, through sharing the technology infrastructure and change management experience gained through this project, other local authorities will be able to take advantage of what is learned to implement similar E-Government initiatives, promoting consistency across all local government."

Entrust has recently been involved in several UK E-Government initiatives at Local and Central government levels.  This includes a UK project to enable secure and confidential messaging between the NHS Pathology Laboratories and GP (general medical practitioners) practices across NHSnet, resulting in a quicker turn-around of test results and providing GPs with timely information to aid diagnosis and enhance customer care.

To find out more about how Entrust is working on the Southampton City Council Pathfinder initiative visit them at InfoSec 23rd - 25th April, Olympia London.

About Southampton City Council:
Southampton City Council became a unitary authority in 1997 and is responsible for running services in the city such as education, social services, council housing, planning control, refuse collection, street cleaning, cemeteries, roads, taxi and music licensing, leisure centres, parks and museums among others.The city itself covers 4,984 hectares and has a population of 216,000. It dates back to Saxon times but was only granted city status in 1964.The city is divided into 15 (16 after May 2002) local government wards which each elect three councillors to the council. Each councillor serves a term of three years.

This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to the use of Entrust's products in Southampton City Council's SmartPath project and possibly other projects, the growth in use of digital identities in local and central governments in the United Kingdom, the provision of online services for additional local and central governmental initiatives, the expected benefit of working with the Southampton City Council, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties.  Among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements are delays in product development, coordination of efforts between Entrust and Southampton City Council, lacking of funding for online government initiatives, undetected software errors or bugs, competitive pressures, market acceptance of technologies of Entrust, technical difficulties, changes in customer requirements, government regulations, general economic conditions and the risk factors detailed from time to time in Entrust's periodic reports and registration statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including without limitation Entrust's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2001.  Entrust cautions investors that it might not update any or all of the foregoing forward-looking statement.